Loving In A Dangerous Time

The hours grow shorter

                                                       as the days go by,

you never get to stop

 and open your eyes.

One minute, your waiting

 for the sky to fall,

next, your dazzled

 by the beauty of it all.

These fragile bodies

of touch and taste,

vibrant skin:

this hell-like place.

Spirit’s open

 to the thrust of grace,

there isn’t a breath 

you can afford to waste.

When you are lovers in a dangerous time.

 Lyrics by singer/songwriter Martin Kerr

The world is awash with painful, poignant paradox; so miraculous and so perilous. Living has never been so full of drama, loving never so risky. Still, this is the time when the thrust of passion and the open heart, are the greatest gifts that the world gets to know. Loving, with the world in such tumult, is an act of great strength, desire and grace.

To love now, is both insane and totally responsive. The odds are not favorable. So many don’t want to bring babies into this world, some are brave enough, perhaps deluded enough, to start a family. We have created a context that fulfills all of our nightmares, and yet grace prevails. How is such a thing humanly possible? It isn’t, and yet, it is. The heart has always been illogical.

One reason, often cited, for human life, is to learn how to love. This tumultuous age certainly provides a most challenging learning ground. All of the ingredients of distrust, alienation, pain and separation, call out, so pervasively. Loving in this storm is wanton soulfulness, a beauty beyond understanding, a courageous act, a lifting of the heart’s veil, a blessing that is deeper than what we have made.

The world scars us, but how we respond to that treatment, that is where the miracles reside. The beauty of the world, so vulnerable, is strong enough to coax out of us, what is uniquely human in each of us. It is a match made by Mystery. This hell-like place, that serves as heaven.

Loving in such a dangerous time requires us to live as fully as we can. The delicate ambiguity of this place provides us with the severest and most apt challenge. It calls for our depths, our gut-wrenching willingness to risk, and lastly, our most desperate prayers of redemption. It is a risky, perhaps soul –rendering, business. Loving, if it is real, always takes place in a dangerous time. This one is custom made.

Did I capture any of it? There is a tension that runs right through the heart of everything. It is what makes living the complex joy-ride it tends to be. There is plenty of heart-ache to go around, some gravy-like good times, and to spice things up, a dollop of awareness. Living brings such luck and such soul-wrenching grace. Maybe I succeeded in hinting at it a little. I hope so.